I'll Sing You This October Song

Okay--it isn't October for two more days, but this is what it feels like: milky chill in the evening, oak leaves barely bronzed here and there, and roses cast one last smattering of blooms before retreating into drabby deadlookingness for the next six months. Thanks for everything, guys; I'll miss you. Stan secures the perimeter.

The Garden in September

To appreciate the fall garden--at least, to appreciate this fall garden, you've got to have Zen----it's wabi-sabi to the -nth degree--the ineffable beauty of imperfection: forgotten empty seedling pots, now home to spiders too menacing-looking to evict, fallen fruit, tarnished blossoms, broken stems....The perennial sunflower stars right now, as you can see, with big brilliant coarse flowers that draw your eye from 'way down the street. I love the way he--if flowers can be gendered, this one is unmistakably a guy--leans across the fence, like a giant stretching.
We are crushing the last of the basil into pesto and freezing it in ice cube trays; the small food processer that Drew's sister passed on to us last year is working its little blades off now. In these pictures you see, besides the brobdignagian helianthus:

red morning glories and improbably tall marigolds tangled in the corpses of tomato vines.

raggedy but still attractive (to butterflies and to me) butterfly bush

a seedling rose of Sharon that emerged this summer spindly and blinking from beneath a cedar tree

guardian lion and the sickly, temperamental but really gorgeous Garden of Eden-y-looking tiny crabapple tree that Drew likes to threaten to chop down because it is such a mess several times over (fallen blossoms, then fallen fruit and eternally falling bird droppings!).

a sweet little seedling rose that had to wait a long time to get planted. Got it in the dirt today. It's a hybrid musk rose of some sort.

This is it, guys--the end of the 2006 garden. The next batch of photos will be a post mortem.

Well, Great Souls are SUPPOSED to Languish in Garrets, Aren't They?

This is my 4th-5th grade classroom in the attic of the Milk Barn: until a couple of weeks ago, it was a curriculum library and auxiliary teaching chamber. Now it is mine, mua-ha-ha-ha! Note my groovy little desk area (with requisite cookie jar!). Walls are sloped, so everything falls off the bulletin boards unless anchored twelve times over. Coats and bookbags hang in the precipitous tiny stairway, and the room is baking hot if the inside door is closed, and polar if the door is left open, so we alternate. I really do enjoy this room; it's got a lot of tattered charm and will get better (more charming and undoubtedly more tattered). You can't see the little reading area near the outside door (which opens up onto catwalk overlooking the playground): it has a wicker chair and...well...a wicker chair is about it right now, but that too will improve. Nothing deficient in here that money can't fix. Except size: when there are ten children in here, and two teachers, it is intimate to the point of claustrophobia.